By MATTHEW HOLT

Our friends over at American Well have two announcements today. First, they’re releasing what they call Online Care Insight, which is essentially the integration of care guidelines into their online care system. We saw a glimpse into this at the Health 2.0 Hawaii chapter meeting last March (sorry if you weren’t there!). Essentially this is a decision support service that helps physicians figure out if the online visit in front of them is appropriate for online care, and then offers clinical decision support during the visit (such as medication reminders, gaps in care, and other alerts)

The second piece of news is that American Well and Optum Health will be combining the American Well online visit service with Optum’s eSync care management platform. eSync basically integrates the data analytics portion with care management, so that a plan or employer can figure out who’s got what dread disease and reach out to them using a series of different contacts. Usually this means email, or nurse or health coach call. Now an online physician visit is part of that continuum.

(Optum Health is a subsidiary of United HealthGroup, and eSync was introduced at a sponsored Deep Dive at the recent Health 2.0 Meets Ix conference. FD Both American Well and Optum have sponsored the Health 2.0 Conference).

Obviously given United’s scale & Optum’s reach into the self-funded employer market this is big news for American Well and online care. The press release also says that the service will be available to individual consumers. I assume that this means that some part of United’s multi-state physician network will be on the system, and that there’ll be an option for consumers who are not in a United plan to access it. If it does mean that, then when this is launched the American Well service will essentially be available nationwide. But that’s my early morning speculation. I’ll try to track down someone from American Well to get more accurate details.